Alien Equation: Math Game App

Alien Equation is a game that is great for elementary students who use iPod touch. While there are plenty of apps like Math Drills (read Buzz Garwood's review) for straight-up drill and practice, Alien Equation also involves number sense and spatial reasoning.

Alien Equation has a story behind the game:

When the navigation computer on your interstellar spaceship contracts a nasty virus and reverts to the intelligence of a three year old what do you do? Can you reteach the computer math while fending off the contagious invaders. Rearrange a grid of numbers and operators into enough valid equations before your system shuts down and strands you on a planet full of bipedal, hairless apes.

The backstory actually isn't very important when playing. Playing involves sliding columns of tiles left and right and rows of tiles up and down to line up tiles that make equations. When you start your first game, you are presented with four slides of instructions:

Alien Equation keeps track of progress, adapts to a player's abilities, and allows for isolation of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. It's certainly worth the current price of 99¢.

Tip for Moving Icons on an iPhone or iPod touch Home Screen

If you watched my Ustream.tv workshop last month, you heard about my frustration with organizing my eight pages of apps on my iPod touch's Home screen. Dragging icons from page to page is time consuming and frustrating.

I came across a video on YouTube that gives great advice for my problem: iPhone Tip: Organizing All Those Apps. The video shows how to use the dock at the bottom of the Home screen to move up to four icons at a time. It's quite a clever trick!